FAQ: How to Workaround Design Time Task List Errors

Sentry administrators may receive errors in the Sentry WebAdmin interface while building or running Task Lists. These errors may prevent successfully building the task list.

Introduction

When a new task is configured, all preceding tasks in the task list are run in the background against the Sample Document. This is the default behavior. If a failure in one of the preceding tasks is encountered, an error is displayed when building the new task, and the new task may not save.

The Sample Documents are used as representative examples of the request or response message that the task list will process at runtime. The sample docs do not need to contain valid data, the format of the document is what is important to Sentry (for XPath purposes).

Running of the task list against the Sample Document does not need to succeed in order for the task list to be valid for runtime messages.

Examples

1. The first task in the list is Verify Document Signature, but the signature in the Sample Document is not valid - perhaps because it is expired or it uses a different key. So this Verify Document task will fail when run against the Sample Document. When you build a second task, you will see the signature verification failure listed in red at the top of the screen.

2. There is a User Identity and Access Control task in the list and you receive a "User not identified" error at the top of the screen when building a subsequent task list.

Solution

To disable the background task processing while building task lists, click the Settings button on the task list and enable the "Ignore sample document errors" option.

For failures related to missing user credentials or a missing certificate, on the Task List Settings page you can enter the credentials or browse to a cert in Sentry.

Lastly, you can disable the preceding tasks in the list so that they are not run when you are building the next task. However, this is only viable if the preceding task is not required for some processing.

For example, if the first task is decryption and the second task is to map from the decrypted document, you need the decryption task to succeed first . For this example, if it is not possible to get the decryption working (because you don't have the key), disable the decryption task and load a different Sample Document (a decrypted version) so you can build the next task. When you are all finished building all tasks, enable all that should be enabled for runtime.

The Run option on the task list will run all tasks in the list against the Sample Document in order. It is not required that this succeed in order for proper runtime message processing. It is normal and common that the Run will fail because the Sample Document is invalid, while actual runtime messages are processed successfully.